Posted March 7, 2007
Editorial: Clean water seems worth $12 million
The numbers seem to speak for themselves:
• Every dairy cow produces about 10,000 gallons of manure a year. Read that again and think about it for a second.
•
Marathon County is home to 850 dairy farms and about 60,000 cows.
That's 600 million gallons of waste that has to go somewhere every
year.
•
Most frequently it is dumped into one of the 850 manure pits in
Marathon County -- pits that can be well-designed, well-engineered and
well-built sanitary holding tanks or simple holes dug with backhoes.
The waste then is spread on fields where it acts as fertilizer.
•
When pits rupture, trailers hauling manure to fields tip over or heavy
rain washes the waste away, the manure eventually ends up in streams
and groundwater.
•
The state has an agreement with farmers, enacted in 2002 as part of a
comprehensive plan to fight water pollution, to pay 70 percent of the
costs associated with preventing farm runoff. That's roughly $100,000
of the $150,000 cost of an engineered 1 million-gallon manure pit.
Now for the really telling number:
•
In the last biennial budget, lawmakers designated a total of $500,000
to fund that 70 percent provision -- just a fraction of the money
really needed, according to Denny Caneff, the executive director of the
River Alliance of Wisconsin.
What does that mean? Back to the numbers:
•
Wisconsin recorded 85 "runoff events" between July 2004 and June 2006.
That means large amounts of cow poop washed into water at least 85
times, killing fish 22 times and contaminating drinking wells 46 times,
according to the Department of Natural Resources. And only 10 of those
incidents involved large "factory farms." The rest were on small,
unregulated operations -- the sorts of farms that can't afford
expensive anti-runoff measures without state help.
•
Gov. Jim Doyle's recently released biennial budget included $12 million
for the farmer reimbursement fund, a substantial improvement over the
$500,000 in the previous budget and a good start, according to Caneff.
But
now the wrangling begins, and what comes out the other end of the
budget process is anyone's guess. In a $58 billion spending bill, $12
million would seem small potatoes.
Of
course, one could argue that farmers should pay the entire cost of
complying with clean-water laws. One also could argue that requiring
that would drive hundreds of small farmers out of business.
To us, clean water is worth $12 million over two years. Let your lawmakers know what you think.
Listening, Mosinee? Two
weeks ago, the most recognizable and perhaps most revered race-based
sports mascot in the country, the University of Illinois' Chief
Illiniwek, danced his last dance.
Responding
to pressure from the NCAA, which took a stand years after American
Indian groups began complaining that the name and mascot were
demeaning, Illinois retired the 81-year-old chief.
It was an emotional decision for the campus and its alumni. But it was the right decision.
We
only can hope the message finally gets through to Mosinee, where the
team still is called the Indians and where students still denigrate
American Indians by pretending to wave tomahawks in the stands.
|
